Tweaks to the filofax set-up

Hmm.. I have that feeling that my filofax set-up is not quite right, but I think I know why and since an ice-rink-like pavement has scuppered my plans for a run this morning I suddenly have a load of time I could use in trying to fix it!

What I think is the problem is the month to view, which I added to what had been a good set-up as a way of making my planning ahead easier than flicking through loads of pages of my filofax. But, I have almost missed some important things because I was only looking at the month to view and they weren’t in there. If I had flicked through the four pages of week to view instead of stared at the (evidently not detailed enough) month to view, I would have been fine.

The problem is ‘granularity’. What size of thing goes into the month to view? At the moment, only birthdays and holidays are marked, but then other things obviously needed logging too. The week to view logs pretty much everything. Maybe not fine detail of work because my work filofax does that. But pretty much everything else is in the week to view diary. That of course leaves it too cluttered to use it to plan the day, which is why I use a day per page diary too.

I think I will take out the month to view and chalk it up to experience.

Why else is my filofax irritating me?

It’s the paper.

No, I’m not about to rant (again) about the totally rubbish quality of the filofax paper. This is something entirely my own fault and a natural (but nonetheless annoying) clash of two of my character flaws attributes:

1) I hate waste

2) I have OCD-tendencies.

So, how are these clashing???

Because I am using a heap of paper in my ‘capture/notes’ section, to use it up (because I hate waste) but none of it matches (making my OCD-tendencies begin to squeal) – some of it is graph, some lined, some lined but by a different maker, some of it is old diary sheets turned upside down… you get the picture. Over time I have acquired a heap of such paper and so have a massive box of it to get through before buying new (matching) paper. It’s in the capture/notes section because it’s largely used for scrap – jotting down something in a hurry then transcribing it to a nice bit of paper, filed properly later, and my thriftiness thinks that using ‘proper paper’ for this when I have a box full of other paper is just wasteful. But, the section is right at the front of my filofax and grates on me every time I open it to jot something down.

What I might try though is to just use one type of scrap paper at a time, even if that means there’s only one or two sheets in there, until that particular ‘stock’ is used up, then move to the next one. I can’t imagine that I would need more than a single sheet in a day and I can always replenish when I get home. The fact that they don’t match the rest of my filofax isn’t so horrendous…